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It's a logical consequence of the "zero trust" network. If an engineer's workstation can make RPCs to production systems, and that engineer is properly entitled to assume some privileged role, then there's no difference between running the automation in prod and running it on your workstation. Even at huge scales, shell tools plus RPC client CLIs can contact every machine in the world pretty promptly.

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There's still differences. If you're running it in prod then the functionality has at least gone through code review and you have higher confidence what's running is what you think it is. If you run things from personal boxes there's always the risk of them not having the latest code, having made a local change and not checking it in, or the worst case of a bad actor doing whatever they want with the privileged role. But if code review isn't required or engineers have unrestricted SSH access to prod hosts then it's pretty much equivalent.

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